5. Complexity – March 2015/Adar 5775

Social Network or Social Networth?
Facebook as Example: Complex options, simple solutions, and how Shmita can help us get t/here.

The impulse towards growth and self-realization needs space to come to fruition. We need to stop and shake off the bedlam of daily lives.

Rabbi A. Y. Kook, Shabbat Ha’Aretz

We live in a culture that is all about producing, output, productivity, ass in chair, making stuff happen, get it done. We get so disconnected from what our fields actually need.

I want to find out what my fields want to produce, what I want to write about, what I want to be doing and experiencing in this life, but in order to get there, I need this Shmita period of releasing.

Havi Brooks, The Fluent Self Blog

For us today, the Shmita Cycle can take shape as a story of transition, from the isolated self towards holistic community; from perceived scarcity towards revealed abundance. It is a story so old and ancient that we have forgotten just how much we need it today, now, for our own survival, for our own evolution and growth.

Yigal Deutscher, Envisioning Sabbatical Culture

While digital technology liberated us from our roles as passive spectators of media, their simplifying bias reduced us once again to passive spectators of technology itself. For most of us, the announcement of the next great “iThing” provokes not eagerness but anxiety: Is this something else we will have to pay for and learn to use? Do we even have a choice?

With each upgrade in technology, our experience of the world is further reduced in complexity.